Immigration Minister Turns Attention to Citizenship Processing

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s next target for reform appears to be the citizenship application process.

Kenney says that he aims to get processing times down to 12 months. Currently some applicants have been waiting up to four years for processing and there are now almost twice as many applications in queue as there was in 2007.

The latest federal budget allocates $44 million dollars to the citizenship program, money which is intended to help speed up the processing of files. Additionally, the government has hinted at intentions to raise the cost of the application fee. This will allow them to bring in more resources and staff to process files more quickly.

There are approximately 350,000 applications in line for processing at the moment. Minister Kenney has indicated that his department will be looking at possible changes to the citizenship application process in the coming months.